Sunday, 1 January 2017

Some Problems With the Frankfort School Idea

As you surf the internet and look at Conservative or Alt-Right sites you will come across something called the Frankfurt School. It is something you will soon learn is infamous in Conservative and Alt-Right for the destruction it has caused across the West. So what is the Frankfort School?

In 1923 at the University of Frankfort in Germany the Institute for Social Research was formed, although it mostly known as the Frankfort School. It was set up by a private fund to study Marxism and to make such research more respectable within Universities. It's big idea was called Critical Theory, which basically said that there is much to criticize in society and here was a theory for doing so. Now most of the people who wrote for the Institute for Social Research were Communists and most them were Jews, although they were not the only writers they were the majority. So as the Nazi's became more powerful within Germany the Institute decided to put in place a plan to move both the school and it's money if the Nazi's should come to power.

In 1933 they did come to power and the Institute moved first to Geneva in Switzerland and then in 1934 to New York where they remained until moving back to Germany in 1951. Ironically going into exile was the making of the school, here were real life European intellectuals who had had to flee the Nazi's because of their political, philosophical and religious beliefs. It gave them a sense of glamour, it also meant that they began publishing in English which increased their readership and influence greatly.

The main criticism of the Frankfort School is that it used this influence to spread Communist ideas and to undermine the West. That much of the upheaval of the 1960's was because the Left began to follow the ideas of the Frankfort School. While it is true that their ideas were hostile to the West and that they did serve to influence the New Left of the 1960's it has a major problem. The upheaval of the 1960's didn't have there origin in the 1960's. The 1960's were simply the time when all of the festering sores that covered Liberalism could no longer be covered up.

The truth is that the 1960's were a Liberal revolution against itself. Sure it had Communist and other influences without any question. But the biggest problem was Liberalism and it's internal contradictions. Everything political and social that came to symbolize the 1960's existed 50 or even a 100 years before that time. Everything that has come after is the logical extension of Liberalism, not of Communism.

Liberalism has since the 1950's accepted the Communist idea of Class Warfare and the Frankfort School is one of many to influence that outcome. I am not saying that it had no influence at all, or that it did not have bad influences, what I am saying is that it wrong to think that the world we live in today can be laid at the feet of the Frankfort School, nothing is quite that simple. To understand our modern world we must study Liberalism and it's history because Liberalism is the problem.

1 comment:

I agree, although I think the problems with liberalism go back to the very roots of the ideology - back to the Enlightenment. Pope Pius IX identified the dangers of liberalism and modernism as early as 1864.

What the Frankfort School did was to weaponise the most dangerous elements and to create a coherent organised strategy for undermining western civilisation. The strategy was originally intended as a means to bring about the Glorious Socialist Revolution. The irony is that the Marxist elements have now all but disappeared and the Frankfort School strategy is now a tool for advancing global capitalism.